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To return: How is that Power present to the universe?
As a One Life.
Consider the life in any living thing; it does not reach only to
some fixed point, unable to permeate the entire being; it is
omnipresent. If on this again we are asked How, we appeal to the
character of this power, not subject to quantity but such that
though you divide it mentally for ever you still have the same
power, infinite to the core; in it there is no Matter to make it
grow less and less according to the measured mass.
Conceive it as a power of an ever-fresh infinity, a principle
unfailing, inexhaustible, at no point giving out, brimming over
with its own vitality. If you look to some definite spot and seek
to fasten on some definite thing, you will not find it. The
contrary is your only way; you cannot pass on to where it is not;
you will never halt at a dwindling point where it fails at last
and can no longer give; you will always be able to move with it-
better, to be in its entirety- and so seek no further; denying
it, you have strayed away to something of another order and you
fall; looking elsewhere you do not see what stands there before
you.
But supposing you do thus "seek no further," how do you
experience it?
In that you have entered into the All, no longer content with the
part; you cease to think of yourself as under limit but, laying
all such determination aside, you become an All. No doubt you
were always that, but there has been an addition and by that
addition you are diminished; for the addition was not from the
realm of Being- you can add nothing to Being- but from non-Being.
It is not by some admixture of non-Being that one becomes an
entire, but by putting non-Being away. By the lessening of the
alien in you, you increase. Cast it aside and there is the All
within you; engaged in the alien, you will not find the All. Not
that it has to come and so be present to you; it is you that have
turned from it. And turn though you may, you have not severed
yourself; it is there; you are not in some far region: still
there before it, you have faced to its contrary.
It is so with the lesser gods; of many standing in their presence
it is often one alone that sees them; that one alone was alone in
the power to see. These are the gods who "in many guises seek our
cities"; but there is That Other whom the cities seek, and all
the earth and heaven, everywhere with God and in Him, possessing
through Him their Being and the Real Beings about them, down to
soul and life, all bound to Him and so moving to that unity which
by its very lack of extension is infinite.
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